No Impact Man: The Movie

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August 2007

August 20, 2007

We've talked before about how plastic bags are the devil. On the other hand, a brand new reusable canvas bag has its own environmental impact.

So...no plastic bags, but you don't want to buy something new, what do you do?

The other day, my friend Gary dropped off a couple of reusable cloth bags he'd made which I thought were really cool. Each bag was just an old tank-top teeshirt sewn closed at the waist. The shoulder straps became the handles.

That's it: the ultra-cool reusable shopping bag!

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 17, 2007

Lest I get too heady with all my talk of radical political acts and trusting wisdom
before science, I thought you might like to know where No Impact Man goes
body surfing while the rest of NYC wrestles their cars out the Long Island
Expressway to the Hamptons.

I’ve been to beaches all over the world and this was one of
the nicest. Swear to God! An abandoned white sandy beach right in New York City. The water was clean, the surf was up, and
we saw a grand total of five people in two hours.

We went because I couldn’t stand another day away from the
ocean and because Michelle had some time off work. Since we use no
carbon-producing transportation, we rode bikes—it took two and half hours.

For
lunch, we enjoyed a farmers market special: a bread, cheese and tomato picnic. To drink, we rinsed our palates with NYC's wonderful tap water carried in ultra-cool reusable water bottles, filled from Fort Tilden's public drinking fountains.

The thing is, we never would have enjoyed this gem of a picnic on this gem of a
beach if it weren't for the "deprivation" of the No Impact Man project. No Impact teaches us to enjoy what we have
instead of wasting our time up trying to figure out how to get what we want.

Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 16, 2007

The other day I posted about turning New York into “one big vacation” by reducing the traffic that make our streets dangerous and our air filthy, making the rivers
swimable, building more parks and planting more trees. A couple of commenters responded by saying that I should be realistic.

I am not realistic. I never want to be realistic. God save us
all from realism, especially if it means we have to limit our vision for the
world.

Most of us love our children and want to be polite to our
neighbors. Most of us, unless we are diseased by terrible living conditions or
alcohol or drugs, would rather give than steal. Most of us, in our hearts, want
peace and harmony for ourselves and for the rest of the world. Most of us, too,
believe that we should take good care of the planet, just because it is the
right thing to do. In other words, in the depths of our hearts, most of us are
not “realistic.”

When I was child, and I first heard of war, I was appalled.
My mother had taught me hitting was wrong. I categorically understood that people
should not hurt each other. Then I grew up and I became realistic. Peace,
feeding the hungry, a healthy planet, an end to war, these things just aren’t realistically
possible, a mature mind understands. Well, when it comes to these things, I’ve
been both an idealistic child and a realistic grownup, and I think I was a
better person when I was an idealistic child.

I believe in the goodness of human nature. I believe we can
get distracted by many things, but that, ultimately, we all want to do what is
best. Because that is true of people, I believe we can make the planet better
for all of us, that we can have peace, feed the hungry and end war.

I believe too that every action each of us takes makes a difference.
Every time each of us rejects a disposable bag brings the world one step closer
to being the kind of place where sea turtles don’t die from eating plastic.
Every time each of us sacrifices a car ride brings us the world one step closer
to being the kind of place where there is no global warming. Every time one of
us tithes our income brings us one step closer to ending world poverty. Every
time one of us calls a member of congress brings our representatives one step
closer to caring more about voters than campaign contributors.

Perhaps people will think I’m too optimistic. But this is
for certain: these things can’t be true if no one takes the chance of believing
they’re true. Because if we don’t believe they are true, we won’t act as though
they’re true. And if we don’t act as though they’re true, they can’t come true.
That’s why realism does little but protect the status quo.

Being optimistic, on the other hand, is the most radical
political act there is.

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 15, 2007

The other day, the environmental blogosphere was atwitter
(Treehugger’s reader
forum and Ask
the EcoGeek, for example) when a report in the Times
suggested that, because of the environmental impact of growing the food that
fuels our bodies, walking is worse for the planet than driving.

When science can say a thing like that, and we take it seriously enough to discuss it, something is wrong. Like maybe we've thrown our God-given judgment out the window.

Science isn’t everything. For one thing, as we all know, it can be spun. That's why it's important to remember that the intellect
is but one--and quite possibly the least--of the human qualities to be relied upon to guide our behavior. We can also depend on common sense, kindness, wisdom,
compassion and intuition, which have the advantage of being tempered by the heart (and often reflect better on humanity, in my view).

As a kid, when my grandmother’s best friend Ginny Shannon
caught me smoking and chucking my cigarette butts in the bushes, she told
me that my body was mine to destroy but that the land was not. I kept smoking
but stopped throwing the butts on the ground. There was a morality to what
Ginny said that, even at 13 years old, I understood. I didn’t need a scientific
study to see her point.

Similarly, no science is required for me to know that
walking will always be better than driving, both for me and the planet. And
honestly, whether the science proves there is such a thing as global warming or
not (though in my book, the proof is incontrovertible), I don’t need a study to tell me that I should treat the planet better. I know, not
because science told me so, but because Ginny Shannon did.

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 14, 2007

Once you start questioning the fabric or your life—as we
have had to for the No Impact Man project—the inquiry never ends. You find
yourself examining all your living assumptions, in this case, whether or not to
give money to homeless people—street charity. For many years, my answer to this
question was no. But I've changed.

Why?

As it turns out, Stephen Dubner, over on his Freakonomics
blog, decided to dig into this whole issue the other day by asking a bunch
of thinkers (including my friend Arthur Brooks) their conclusions on the issue.
My new thinking on the subject aligns most with what Barbara Ehrenreich had to
say:

“…I defer to Jesus on beggar-related matters. He said, if a
man asks for your coat, give him your cloak too. (Actually, he said if a man
“sue thee at the law” for the coat, but most beggars skip the legal process.)
Jesus did not say: First, administer a breathalyzer test to the supplicant, or,
first, sit him down for a pep talk on “focus” and “goal-setting.” He said: Give
him the damn coat.”

For me, though, the issue settled itself by more
self-referential analysis. Since the No Impact project is largely about
learning to live a life more in line with my conscience, I decided to listen to what my conscience had to say.

I noticed that if I walked straight past a person who asked
me for money, I spent an uncomfortable block—as I had repeatedly for years—rationalizing
to myself that I didn’t give it to them “for their own good.” On the other
hand, if I gave the street person money, my thoughts left the panhandler behind
and my conscience was at peace. Case closed.

PS These are very personal decisions I discuss here on No
Impact Man. My goal with the project is to live according to my conscience and
to share the very shaky and faulty process I go through to do so. It is not my
goal to get my readers to live according to my conscience. Nor, for that
matter, is the goal for me to live according the conscience of my readers.

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 13, 2007

We don’t use carbon-producing transportation during the No
Impact project, so we have to find ways to make a little bit of summer vacation
right here in New York City. Today,
we went with Isabella, my two-year-old daughter, and played in the Washington Square fountain.

“That was so funny, daddy,” by which she meant that was so
much fun. And it was fun for us, too. A couple of friends happened to be
walking by and they stopped and chatted and we all laughed and cooled by the spouting
water.

Meanwhile, tens—if not hundreds—of thousands of New Yorkers
climbed in their cars this weekend to get to the Hamptons or have flown further afield to find other water to play in. Who can blame them? In
our emphasis on having a robust economy, we have turned New York City into a cesspool.

Cars crowd our streets making them too noisy, dangerous and
filled with exhaust fumes for families to hang out. Raw sewage and chemicals
surging into our rivers make them too filthy to swim. Plowing under air-cooling
green spaces—to construct more buildings—makes the whole
place too hot.

And we do all of those things, supposedly, for the sake of financial
efficiency. The city infrastructure is designed so we can all work a little
harder and put a little more money in our pockets, which we then have to spend to get away from--you guessed it--the efficient yet unpleasant city infrastructure.

What if we were to emphasize making the place wonderful to
live in instead? What if we made New York (and the other cities) the kind of place that we all didn’t feel we needed to
get away from? What if we turned the whole city into one massive vacation?

We would just need to make the streets safe to walk, play, hang out, ride bikes and breathe in; clean up the
rivers so we could windsurf and swim; grow more trees and less buildings to give us shade and cool air; and build a few more parks and fountains to splash around in.

Imagine a place like that. Not only would that save the
hundreds of thousands of cars and airplanes leaving the city and pumping clouds
of CO2 into the atmosphere, but it would make where we live a much nicer
place. We could use global warming as a reason, not to deprive
ourselves of things we want, but to figure out how to live better. That is one
of the opportunities I see in our crisis.

PS If you would like to read more about making http://www.transalt.org the streets of New York better for people, look at the website of Transportation Alternatives.

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 10, 2007

How, in a city like New York,
can you not make trash but still have exactly what you want exactly when you
want it? You know, like coffee, bagels, fresh juice... It all comes in
throw-away containers.

My solution, in the beginning of the No Impact Man project, was
to run out and buy a reusable cup. That took care of the liquids and drinks. Then,
I shopped around for hours looking for a bowl with a lid. I wanted to be sure I
could trashlessly pop into any food place for takeout whenever
the yen for, say, falafel took me.

You know what, though? Humping around cups and bowls and
other accouterments in order to quiet the need for immediate gratification got
to be unbearably inconvenient.

So here is one radical solution I came to. If I didn’t have
time to sit down and drink a coffee out of a real cup, I didn’t have it. If I
couldn’t eat food from a real plate, I didn’t eat it. There was no need to buy a
full table setting of portable cups and bowls to be green. Instead, I finally learned to either do without or wait until later.

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 09, 2007

Somehow I’ve gotten into the terrible habit of compulsively
checking No Impact Man’s ranking on Technorati
to see how it compares with other blogs (1,422 as of this writing, by the way).
How pathetic I am in this regard became all the more apparent to me when I
mentioned the compulsion to a friend who didn’t even know what Technorati was
(it’s the search engine for blogs). How could I let my concerns get so
rarified?

But it’s good to get caught up in one’s humanity every once
in a while, in this case because it helps me to understand the Silicon Valley
multimillionaires, written about in Sunday’s New York Times, who continue to work their butts off to get even larger
wads of cash. As the Times reports, many of them feel worried to
death that they still don’t have enough and toil for the day when they do. A
couple of quotes from the story:

“Everyone around here looks at the people above them,” said
Gary Kremen, the 43-year-old founder of Match.com, a popular online dating
service. “It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial guys
worth $7 million wondering what’s so special about them when there are all
these guys worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Along with two partners, [Celeste Baranski] founded a
software company, Vitamin D, and already she is resigned to the sleepless
nights and other stresses that await her. “I ask myself all the time,” Ms.
Baranski confessed, “why I do this.”

“Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1
percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of
1 percent,” [Umberto Milletti] said. “You try not to get caught up in it,” he
added, “but it’s hard not to.”

I worry a lot about this keeping-up-with-Jones’s stuff
because I believe that many of us compulsively work our butts off to get more stuff—which
means more resources have to be dug out of the planet’s guts and more
pollutants have to be vomited into the air, earth and water. And what stings is
the fact that we often find out that getting more isn’t making us happier.

The solution, according to the Times, for an unhappy Silicon Valley millionaire?
Get even more, because the problem must be still not having enough. It’s just a
matter of buckling down to become a billionaire.

Which brings me back to my Technorati rating. The other day,
I was obsessing about turning the corner between being ranked over 1500 to
being ranked under 1500. Michelle kept telling me, “It’s not going to make you
happier.” And when I screeched through to the 1400s, I discovered she was
right. In fact, what happened was I started obsessing about breaking 1400 (22
to go). Getting a better ranking doesn’t make me happier, but it helps fool me
into thinking that I’m at least approaching the magic number—whatever it
is—that actually will make me happy.

But of course that number doesn’t exist. Just as it doesn’t
exist for the Silicon Valley millionaires.

The point is that it is very human to aim for these illusory
goals and to hope that they will make us happy (or safe or secure) when we
achieve them. The danger, though, for me, is that I attach to goals like these,
find out that I’ve used up my limited time in this life on something—a
Technorati rating, God help me—that is essentially meaningless, and meanwhile,
in my tunnel-vision, manage to hurt myself, the planet and other creatures by not
attending to what is really important.

The antidote? I try to remind myself to stop running
from my insecurities and fears, to see them for what they are (illusions), and
to have faith in what is. The Buddhists call it returning to the moment. The
Christian’s call it trusting in God’s will. The shrinks might call it getting
rid of anxiety. The Tao te Ching just says that a man who knows that enough is
enough will always have enough.

Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 08, 2007

As you know, No Impact Man as a project asks the question, "What can I, as an individual, do to help the planet?" And I believe strongly that individual action is important, but I don't believe it replaces political action. I believe the two are complimentary and strongest when they come together. For that reason, my colleagues Jessica Osserman, Devon Bertram and I have been reaching out to major presidential candidates of all parties to ask them to participate in a series of email interviews to do with environmentalism. For comparison purposes, each of the candidates will be asked to answer the same questions. Here is the first of candidate replies, from Senator John Edwards.

1.Do you support an 80% reduction
in carbon emissions by 2050? If so, do you agree that a 40 MPG fuel
efficiency standard and a moratorium on building coal-fueled power plants
are necessary, or do you have alternative plans? If not, what should
our goals be and how do you intend to accomplish them?

Global warming is the most important environmental challenge of our
lifetime. That’s why I am proud that I was the first presidential
candidate to offer a detailed plan for halting global warming that includes
an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. I am glad
that some of the other candidates have followed me in adopting this
call for change.

In order to achieve that level of emissions reduction, we are going
to have to raise automotive fuel-efficiency standards significantly
in this country. I have called for increasing fuel economy standards
to 40 miles per gallon by 2016. That would single-handedly reduce oil
demand by 4 million barrels per day. As president, I will invest one
billion dollars into making sure that we make the most fuel efficient
cars on the planet here in the United States, with union workers. We
can do it by investing in new technologies like hybrid and plug-in hybrid
cars, ultra-light materials, and hydrogen fuel cells.

I also support a national ban on the construction of all new coal-fired
power plants that cannot capture their emissions. America will rely
on its coal resources for decades or longer, and we need to find a way
to use them without heating the planet. I am committed to investing
$1 billion a year in research and testing to jumpstart the means to
store large amounts of carbon dioxide safely underground. New coal-fired
plants should be built with the required technology so that plants built
today will be able to permanently and safely store their carbon emissions
tomorrow.

2. A number of polls have suggested that American citizens may not
be willing to make lifestyle sacrifices to support environmental improvements.
Do you think significant lifestyle changes (like driving much less)
may ultimately be necessary and if so how would you convince Americans
to accept them?

I’ve seen with my own eyes what Americans can do when called to action.
In January, my campaign asked supporters to join our One Corps National
Day of Energy Action. All across the country, members of One Corps –
the community service arm of our campaign – took action and worked
on community service activities including weatherizing homes and distributing
energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs.

That is just the beginning. It’s time to ask the American people to
be patriotic about something other than war. Our generation must be
the one that says ‘yes’ to alternative, renewable fuels and ends
forever our dependence on foreign oil. Our generation must be the one
that accepts responsibility for conserving natural resources -- and
both demands and develops the tool to do it. Our generation must be
the one that says, ‘we must halt global warming.’ If we don’t
act now, if we don’t seize this moment, it will be too late.

I have a plan to meet the demand for more electricity in the next decade
through efficiency, instead of producing more power. Americans can get
more power out of the electricity now available, typically at half the
cost of producing more supply.

There are large energy savings possible today in energy generation,
transmission, and use in homes, factories, and offices. I have called
for a national goal of meeting our expected rise in electricity demand
by getting more power out of the electricity we use now for the next
decade.

To accomplish this ambitious goal, we need to make efficiency profitable
for utilities. Most utilities profit from selling electricity, even
when it would be cheaper to help their customers use less energy. As
president, I will call on states to decouple utilities' energy profits
from sales, as California and nine other states have done, so they can
focus on serving customer needs. States can also reward utilities for
meeting green energy targets.

I support expanding smart meters and smart grids to help consumers use
energy more wisely. By displaying energy use and its price as it is
used, smart meters encourage consumers to use less energy and to use
it when it can be generated less expensively. Utilities can also use
information technology to monitor electricity demand, allowing them
to plan their production more efficiently.

3.Some environmentalists are concerned that, with carbon emissions
dominating dialogue on conservation, other issues may be ignored. What
is your second environmental priority after global warming and what
do you intend to do about it?

Stopping global warming is my highest environmental priority, but after
eight years of the Bush Administration there will be a lot of work to
do. In my first year, I will work to reverse every harmful environmental
executive order and regulation issued by the Bush administration. I
will submit legislation strengthening the Clean Air and Clean Water
Acts and restoring the “polluter pays” principle in the Superfund.

4. A number of environmental thinkers have suggested that continued
growth in GDP (and the implied growth in resources) and solving our
environmental crisis are at odds with each other. Do you think growth
in GDP and environmental sustainability are at odds with each other?
Does there need to be a choice between economic growth and commitment
to our environment? If so, how do you negotiate between these two priorities?
If not, how do you see this inter-relationship?

Securing our environmental future will not require shortchanging our
economic one. In fact, the opposite is true. Right now, our economic
progress is threatened by rising energy prices and our dependence on
unstable regions for fuel. Pursuing sound environmental and energy policy
will actually drive the economy, rather than limiting it.

I have no doubt that with the right leadership, we will create a New
Energy Economy right here in America. We’re going to create new jobs.
We’re going to build the cars of the future here. And I am convinced
that it is going to create new opportunities for all kinds of Americans
– bring the family farms back to life – create new high-paying “green
collar” jobs making and installing clean energy technology – and
new opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs.

I will create a New Energy Economy Fund by auctioning off $10 billion
in greenhouse pollution permits and repealing subsidies for big oil
companies. The fund will support U.S. research and development in energy
technology, help entrepreneurs start new businesses, and help Americans
conserve energy.

One of my concerns is that the economic benefits from transforming our
economy be distributed fairly. What’s happened in this country over
the last generation over the entire economy is the growth has gone into
the hands of a privileged few. Over the last 20 years, about 40 percent
of the economic growth has gone to the top 1 percent.

If you care, the way I do, about the bringing the Two Americas that
I’ve talked about together and building One America, then we have
to make sure that doesn’t happen with the jobs and wealth I know we
can create from clean energy.

I have a plan to open up how we provide electricity in America to create
more competition and more options. What we have now is we have centrality;
big power companies that make more money, the more power we use. What
we want to do is spread and create more competition. Decentralize these
power grids, allow community groups, smaller communities, grassroots
organizations to compete and drive down prices.

I believe we have the ability to harness American ingenuity to stop
global warming. But if all we do is replace oil tycoons with green tycoons,
we will have missed an opportunity to help build One America – where
everyone has a chance to succeed.

5. What kind of car do you drive or travel in and how many MPG does
it get?

My family drives two cars—a Ford Escape
Hybrid that gets a combined 30 miles per gallon, and, for times when
we need to transport more people, a Chrysler Pacifica, that gets 19
miles per gallon combined.

Photo by Rachel Feierman

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

August 07, 2007

A while back I went to Shabbat dinner at my friend Rabbi
Steve Greenberg’s house. At a certain stage, he handed out booklets and we
all sang together. I’m not Jewish so it was new to me, in a wonderful way, and
I felt jealous that we did not all sing together in my house. I wondered why
not? Why is singing together and making music not something we do everyday?

Part of it was the stereo. Why would you try to sing or play
an instrument yourself if you can buy a CD where somebody else can do it so
much better? I’ve picked up the guitar ten different times in my life but never
been satisfied because I couldn’t play a song that even came close to
resembling whoever I was trying to copy at the time.

But why does making music have to sound like someone else?
Why is there some standard of perfection to adhere to? When I had dinner at
Rabbi Steve’s, there was no perfection. That wasn’t what made it great. What
made it great was the togetherness. We sang and gently tapped on the table to
the beat and smiled at each other and pointed to the correct line in the books
when we lost our place. It wasn't about perfection; it was about connection.

For a while there after that, I looked for a second-hand
guitar (there’s no buying anything new on the project), but it didn’t work out
and the idea kind of fell through. A few weeks ago, though, my friend Michelle
Casillas, the lovely and beautiful musician who leads the New York band Ursa
Minor, brought over a nylon string guitar for me to borrow.

She told me I could play just about any song I wanted with
just about three chords: A, D and E. I knew the chords already from my previous
sojourns into guitar playing. What I didn’t know how to do was accept my
mediocrity.

This time on the guitar was different, though. I wasn’t
trying to get something to sound as good as my iPod. I just wanted the experience
of singing and playing together with my family and friends and Isabella, my
little girl. This time, because there was no stereo to compete with—and because
we missed music—I was willing to just accept the best I could do.

The obsession with perfection that comes with the consumer
culture has made many of us ashamed of our creative efforts. Few of us
sing—especially not in front of each other—because we know of so many who can
do it better. Few of us show our paintings for the same reason. But why is the
best always so important? Besides, why waste our time making admittedly
mediocre music or art when we can just plop on the couch, watch TV and eat
potato chips?

Well, as it happens, the best isn’t so important to my
two-and-half-year-old daughter Isabella. Because the other night, when I sat
beside her bed and very haltingly figured out how to play Puff the Magic Dragon using those A, D and E chords, she looked at
me and said the one sentence I live my life to hear from her: “Daddy, I’m so
happy.”

PS If you feel like unplugging your ears from the iPod and
blowing the dust off your old guitar, the chord chart above is just for you
(and it comes courtesy of the League
of Guitarists).

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.